Olivia Jacobs competes in National Spelling Bee next week

Olivia Jacobs, a seventh-grade Tisbury School student, heads off this weekend to Washington, D.C., to compete against 274 top-notch spellers in the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee on June 1-2.

Olivia will represent the Island at the national competition as the winner of the Martha’s Vineyard Public Schools spelling bee held on March 18. She also won last year.

For those who would like to cheer Olivia on, rounds two and three of the Scripps National Spelling Bee preliminaries on Wednesday, June 1, will be broadcast live on the Internet at ESPN3.com between 8 am and 5:15 pm. Olivia is speller 112 and will participates im round two of the preliminaries between 8 and 9:45 am and round three between 1:15 and 3:30 pm.

On June 2 the spelling bee semifinals will be broadcast live on ESPN from 10 am-1 pm and the finals from 8:30 pm-10 pm.

The Martha’s Vineyard Times sponsors the Island spelling bee and underwrites the cost of the trip to the national Bee for the champion and a chaperone.